The New Deal: Relief, Recovery, And Reform

The New Deal was a series of social liberal programs enacted in the United States between 1933 and 1938, and a few that came later. They included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were in response to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians refer to as the 3 Rs, Relief, Recovery, and Reform. Relief for the unemployed and poor, recovery of the economy to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. For relief he had the farm and rural programs. Rural America was a high priority for Roosevelt and his energetic Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace. FDR believed that full economic recovery

In 1933, the Administration launched the Tennessee Valley Authority, a project involving dam construction planning on an unprecedented scale to curb flooding, generate electricity, and modernize poor farms in the Tennessee Valley region of the Southern United States. Under the Farmers' Relief Act of 1933, the government paid compensation to farmers who reduced output, thereby rising prices. As a result of this legislation, the average income of farmers almost doubled by 1937. For recovery he had the NRA blue eagle campaign. From 1929 to 1933, the industrial economy had been suffering from a vicious cycle of deflation. Since 1931, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the voice of the nation's organized business, promoted an anti-deflationary scheme that would permit trade associations to cooperate in government instigated cartels to stabilize prices within their

Instead their remedy, designed in cooperation with big business, was the NIRA. It included stimulus funds for the WPA to spend, and sought to raise prices, give more bargaining power for unions and reduce harmful competition. At the center of the NIRA was the National Recovery Administration headed by former General Hugh S. Johnson, who had been a senior economic official in World War I. Johnson called on every business establishment in the nation to accept a stopgap blanket code a minimum wage of between 20 and 45 cents per hour, a maximum workweek of 35?45 hours, and the abolition of child labor. Johnson and Roosevelt contended that the blanket code would raise consumer purchasing power and increase employment. There was also the social security act. Until 1935 there were just a dozen states that had old age insurance laws but these programs were woefully underfunded and therefore almost worthless. Just one state had an insurance program. The United States was the only modern industrial country where people faced the Depression without any national system of social security. Even the work programs of the New Deal were just meant as immediate relief, made to run for less than a